Exhibit A is a pair of recent acquisitions from eBay.
The second one is, to my mind, a rather good bit of graphic design.
Now these are in lovely condition – they apparently came from the printer’s own archive – and so we thought we’d got a bit of a bargain. Until they arrived. They’re, um, quite small, as you can see from my cunning Minifigure + cat hair scaling device.
Now this is not the fault of the seller, although I could perhaps argue that they are not in fact posters; mostly the surprise is entirely of our own doing for not reading the dimensions on the listing. So today’s moral is, read those eBay listings carefully otherwise you may not get what you think you’re getting.
All of which does rather beg the question of what in fact we did actually get. I’m not even sure what the pieces of paper are for – Mr Crownfolio reckons that they are labels for sweet jars but I’m open to other suggestions if you have them. Then there’s the matter of who designed them? A brief investigation hasn’t come up with anything. And what is a chocolate snowdrop anyway? I have no idea. But I do like their label.
While I am here, you might as well see a few other things we’ve bought recently, starting with a whole heap of GPO posters. These three came from the same seller.
You won’t be too surprised to learn that the last one is by Harry Stevens. What’s a bit more amazing is that it’s from 1980. I think we may have a date for the last gasp of the classic GPO poster there.
This one only dates from 1966, but it’s a double winner, partly because it’s by Andre Amstutz, and partly because I love these Properly Packed Parcels Please posters and can’t get enough of them.
While the last exhibit is, in a way, the reverse of the Fry’s chocolate ones, because it turned up in the post and was actually more interesting than I expected.
Just look at those paper sculpture scouts. A sentence you don’t get to use often enough.
6 Comments
I agree with you about the Properly Packed Parcels posters, always witty and lovely to look at. My own lucky find this weekend was in our local Oxfam shop, one of the marvellous British Railways County Map posters, in this case Yorkshire by Estra Clark from 1949. A bonus that it was also beautifully framed.
That’s a bit of a winner especially in a frame. I’ve never ever found a poster in a charity shop, so I am very impressed (and a bit jealous).
I love the GPO posters. They seem to have had a real spell of investing in good graphic design. I found a couple of telegrams from the 1950s at a postcard fair and was delighted with them: http://retrobureau.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/telegram-sam/
I agree, and they invested in good design for longer, I think, than any other institution. The telegrams are great, I’ve posted a bit about them before:
http://vintageposterblog.com/2010/06/24/telegraphese/
And I’m sure I mentioned the Ruth Artmonsky book about telegrams too, but can’t find that. It’s useful though.
Re: “An Evening Call brings you Together”…
Not sure what ‘Princess Di’ was doing being brought together with ‘Lord Snowdon’, but there you go…
Arf. But surprisingly true.